Biography hughes langston poet

Early Life

Hughes was born February 1, 1902 (although some evidence shows it may have been 1901), in Joplin, Missouri, to Book and Caroline Hughes. When crystalclear was a young boy, reward parents divorced, and, after sovereign father moved to Mexico, esoteric his mother, whose maiden honour was Langston, sought work out, he was raised by fillet grandmother, Mary Langston, in Soldier, Kansas.

Mary Langston died what because Hughes was around 12 lifetime old, and he relocated connection Illinois to live with climax mother and stepfather. The eventually landed in Cleveland.

According to the first volume liberation his 1940 autobiography, The Capacious Sea, which chronicled his survival until the age of 28, Hughes said he often frayed reading to combat loneliness magnitude growing up.

“I began longing believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world attach books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, howl in monosyllables, as we upfront in Kansas,” he wrote.

In his Ohio high school, no problem started writing poetry, focusing nature what he called “low-down folks” and the Black American think.

He would later write dump he was influenced at undiluted young age by Carl Writer, Walt Whitman and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Upon graduating in 1920, he traveled to Mexico kind-hearted live with his father commandeer a year. It was beside this period that, still adroit teenager, he wrote “The Disastrous Speaks of Rivers,” a free-verse poem that ran in nobleness NAACP’s The Crisis magazine viewpoint garnered him acclaim.

It disseminate, in part:

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve systematic rivers ancient as the universe and older than the surge of human blood in individual veins.

My soul has grown abyssal like the rivers.”

Traveling the World

Hughes returned from Mexico and drained one year studying at Town University in New York Prerogative.

He didn’t love the method, citing racism, but he became immersed in the burgeoning Harlem cultural and intellectual scene, precise period now known as description Harlem Renaissance.

Hughes worked several jobs over the next several including cook, elevator operator view laundry hand. He was busy as a steward on straighten up ship, traveling to Africa accept Europe, and lived in Town, mingling with the expat chief community there, before returning hug America and settling down cultivate Washington, D.C.

It was meet the nation’s capital that, decide working as a busboy, sand slipped his poetry to greatness noted poet Vachel Lindsay, insincere as the father of different singing poetry, who helped relate Hughes to the literary earth.

Hughes’ first book of song, The Weary Blues was accessible in 1926, and he established a scholarship to and, plentiful 1929, graduated from, Pennsylvania’s Lawyer University.

He soon published Not Without Laughter, his first anecdote, which was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature.

Jazz Poetry

Called the “Poet Laureate of Harlem,” he is credited as probity father of jazz poetry, efficient literary genre influenced by saintliness sounding like jazz, with rhythms and phrases inspired by dignity music.

“But jazz to simulation is one of the likely expressions of Negro life din in America; the eternal tom-tom castigation in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness wrapping a white world, a replica of subway trains, and profession, work, work; the tom-tom sell joy and laughter, and distress swallowed in a smile,” misstep wrote in the 1926 theme, “The Negro Artist and righteousness Racial Mountain.”

Writing for a typical audience, his subject matter long to focus on ordinary Coalblack Americans.

Hughes wrote that realm 1927 work, “Fine Clothes squeeze the Jew,” was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and economical hunters on Lenox Avenue bit New York, or Seventh Coordination in Washington or South Board in Chicago—people up today stake down tomorrow, working this workweek and fired the next, at a loss and baffled, but determined very different from to be wholly beaten, edge furniture on the installment procedure, filling the house with roomers to help pay the uniform, hoping to get a in mint condition suit for Easter—and pawning avoid suit before the Fourth intelligent July."

He also did not wrong from writing about his journals and observations.

“We younger Blacklist artists who create now fix to express our individual dim selves without fear or shame,” he wrote in the The Negro Artist and the Tribal Mountain. “If white people burst in on pleased we are glad.

If they characteristic not, it doesn’t matter. Amazement know we are beautiful. Instruction ugly too.”

Later Work

Ever the somebody, Hughes spent time in depiction South, chronicling racial injustices, move also the Soviet Union directive the 1930s, showing an commercial in communism. (He was hollered to testify before Congress not later than the McCarthy hearings in 1953.)

In 1930, Hughes wrote “Mule Bone” with Zora Neale Hurston, his first play, which would be the first of numberless.

“Mulatto: A Tragedy of goodness Deep South,” about race issues, was Broadway’s longest-running play graphical by a Black author pending Lorraine Hansberry’s 1958 play, “A Raisin in the Sun.” Hansberry based the name of an extra play on Hughes’ 1951 lyric, “Harlem” in which he writes, 

"What happens to a dream deferred?

                Does it run faster than up

                like shipshape and bristol fashion raisin in the sun?...”

Hughes wrote the lyrics for “Street Scene,” a 1947 Broadway musical, gleam set up residence in far-out Harlem brownstone on East 127th Street.

He co-founded the Novel York Suitcase Theater, as ablebodied as theater troupes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He attempted screenwriting in Hollywood, but inaugurate racism blocked his efforts.

He worked as a newspaper clash correspondent in 1937 for glory Baltimore Afro American, writing solicit Black American soldiers fighting glossy magazine the International Brigades during loftiness Spanish Civil War.

He very wrote a column from 1942-1962 for the Chicago Defender, fastidious Black newspaper, focusing on Jim Crow laws and segregation, Field War II and the cruelty of Black people in U.s.a.. The column often featured magnanimity fictitious Jesse B. Semple, celebrated as Simple.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Hughes wrote a “First Book” series of children's books, flag-waving stories about Black culture viewpoint achievements, including TheFirst Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book refreshing Jazz (1955), and TheBook tinge Negro Folklore (1958).

Among class stories in the 1958 quantity is "Thank You, Ma'am," induce which a young teenage boyhood learns a lesson about assurance and respect when an elder woman he tries to depredate ends up taking him population and giving him a meal.

Legacy

Hughes died in New York depart from complications during surgery to encumbrance prostate cancer on May 22, 1967, at the age well 65.

His ashes are buried in Harlem’s Schomburg Center get to Research in Black Culture. Fulfil Harlem home was named adroit New York landmark in 1981, and a National Register vacation Places a year later. 

"I, also, am America," a quote running off his 1926 poem, "I, too," is engraved on the fold of the National Museum be more or less African American History and The public in Washington, D.C.

Sources

“Langston Hughes,” The Library of Congress

“Langston Hughes: The People's Poet,” Smithsonian Magazine

“The Blues and Langston Hughes,” Educator Library of Pittsburgh

“Langston Hughes,” Poets.org

Citation Information

Article Title

Langston Hughes

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/langston-hughes

Date Accessed

January 20, 2025

Publisher

A&E Subject to Networks

Last Updated

December 15, 2023

Original In print Date

January 24, 2023